KDL Recommends

To complement the KDL Happiness theme, these books will lift your spirits.

PS, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern

Holly couldn’t live without her husband Gerry, until the day she had to. They were the kind of young couple who could finish each other’s sentences. When Gerry dies, 30-year-old Holly is set adrift, unable to pick up the pieces, but with the help of a series of letters her husband left her before he died and a little nudging from an eccentric assortment of family and friends, she learns to laugh, overcome her fears, and discover a world she never knew existed.

Eight students gather in Lillian’s Restaurant every Monday night for cooking class. It soon becomes clear, however, that each one seeks a recipe for something beyond the kitchen as Chef Lillian, a woman whose connection with food is both soulful and exacting, helps them to create dishes whose flavor and techniques expand beyond the restaurant and into the secret corners of her students’ lives.

Obliged to borrow a book when her corgis stray into a mobile library, the Queen discovers a passion for reading, setting the palace upon its head and causing the royal head of Great Britain to question her role in the monarchy.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attentions, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake.

At first glance, decorator Erin Gilbert fell in love with the charming little bungalow on a quiet street in Crestview, Colorado. Until she stepped inside. There, eccentric widow Helen Walker has created a maze of bric-a-brac, papers, and just plain junk that she won’t throw out. Even worse: two bizarre deaths have convinced Helen she is being stalked by a serial killer–and that any one of her nosy friends and neighbors might be to blame.

Antique “picker” Jane Wheel is making a career out of going through old stuff. When she finds a whole room full of saloon items from the Chicago area 1950’s, Jane makes a gruesome discovery. Packed between the glassware and bowling trophies and old photographs, she uncovers one highly personal, unusual and creepy collectible that she is sure the saloon keeper would have preferred to have kept to himself.

In the quiet English hamlet of Wall, Tristran Thorn embarks on a remarkable journey through the world of Faerie where he encounters dangerous rivals on his quest to recover a fallen star for the woman he loves, the hauntingly beautiful Victoria Forester.

Posey Osterhagen had her heart broken at sixteen by Liam Murphy, the bad boy of Bellsford, New Hampshire. Now the owner of a successful architectural salvaging company, she can’t help but feel that there’s something missing from her life—something like Liam, who is back in town and sending her traitorous heart into overdrive once again.

How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You by The Oatmeal,Matthew Inman

If your cat is kneading you, that’s not a sign of affection—he’s actually checking your internal organs for weakness. If your cat brings you a dead animal, this isn’t a gift, it’s a warning. Inman presents a collection of cat comics, facts, and instructional guides from TheOatmeal.com.

From the initial formation of The Freesia Court Book Club and over the course of the next thirty years, five women in small-town Minnesota share the events, triumphs, tragedies, hardships, joys, and sorrows of their lives.

After twenty-eight years of marriage to her husband Lucky, Addy Lipton feels anything but happily married. But when Lucky wins a trip to paradise—aka Costa Rica—Addy has a faint hope they may be able to turn things around. This sparkling and inspirational tale will hit you where you live—and show you that just as happiness can get buried beneath the jumble of years, it can be rediscovered.

Feeling unattractive and unappreciated as she enters her fifties, wife and mother Clover wakes up one morning and discovers that she has actually become invisible, a condition that goes unnoticed by her family.

The Ladies’ Society for the Conservation of Martinis—once dissolved under life-shattering circumstances and now reunited again after the death of one of its members—discovers a letter that reveals a shocking secret and a final wish that will send the women on a life-changing journey … proving that nothing is more powerful than the will of a true girlfriend and a good, strong martini.

Calla Lily Ponder bursts into life—guided by Moon Lady, a protective feminine force—where she thrives in her small Louisiana town until the ending of her first love pushes her to Crescent City, where she discovers she has the power of “healing hands” to change lives and end pain.